Thoughts on books, reading and publishing from the staff and friends of the Tattered Cover Book Store.

Saturday, May 3, 2014

More Great Titles On Our Shelves

Fifteen years ago, Krista Bremer was a surfer and an aspiring journalist who dreamed of a comfortable American life of adventure, romance, and opportunity. Then, on a running trail in North Carolina, she met Ismail, sincere, passionate, kind, yet from a very different world. Raised a Muslim--one of eight siblings born in an impoverished fishing village in Libya--his faith informed his life. When she and Ismail made the decision to become a family, Krista embarked on a journey she never could have imagined, an accidental jihad: a quest for spiritual and intellectual growth that would open her mind, and more important, her heart.

An award-winning debut novel from a rising star in Australia--a hauntingly beautiful story about the bond of brotherhood and the fragility of youth.

Joe, Miles, and Harry, are growing up on the remote southern coast of Tasmania, a stark, untamed landscape swathed by crystal blue waters. Their lives are shaped by their father's moods: Like the ocean he fishes, he is wild and unpredictable, warped by a devastating secret.

Every day their dad battles the unpredictable ocean to make a living. Harry, the youngest, is the most vulnerable and it seems he bears the brunt of his father's anger. Unlike Joe, Harry and Miles are too young to leave home and are forced to live under the dark cloud of their father's mood, trying to stay as invisible as possible whenever he is home. Miles tries his best to watch out for Harry, but he can't be there all the time. Often alone, Harry finds joy in the small treasures he discovers by the edge of the sea--shark eggs, cuttlefish bones, and the friendship of a mysterious neighbor. But sometimes small treasures, or a brother's love, are not enough...

Perla is a beautiful young Cuban-American woman who lives with her mother in a modest house in Miami’s Little Havana. After her father’s death, she finds herself leading a secret life.

Julian is from Russia. His father was a legendary Siberian hunter who fell victim to his own bravery. When Julian is forced into an orphanage, he discovers that he has more in common with his father than he originally thought. Taken under the wing of a gruff, elderly businessman, Julian makes his way to New York City . . . and, years later, into the club where Perla is dancing. Soon after they meet, Perla is on a plane to Manhattan at the mysterious request of Julian’s friend—a journey that will change the course of her life.

A bold, epic debut novel set during the war and financial crisis that defined the beginning of our century

One September morning in 2008, an investment banker approaching forty, his career in collapse and his marriage unraveling, receives a surprise visitor at his West London townhouse. In the disheveled figure of a South Asian male carrying a backpack, the banker recognizes a long-lost friend, a mathematics prodigy who disappeared years earlier under mysterious circumstances. The friend has resurfaced to make a confession of unsettling power.

In the Light of What We Know takes us on a journey of exhilarating scope--from Kabul to London, New York, Islamabad, Oxford, and Princeton--and explores the great questions of love, belonging, science, and war. It is an age-old story: the friendship of two men and the betrayal of one by the other. The visitor, a man desperate to climb clear of his wrong beginnings, seeks atonement; and the narrator sets out to tell his friend's story but finds himself at the limits of what he can know about the world--and, ultimately, himself. Set against the breaking of nations and beneath the clouds of economic crisis, this surprisingly tender novel chronicles the lives of people carrying unshakable legacies of class and culture as they struggle to tame their futures.

In an extraordinary feat of imagination, Zia Haider Rahman has telescoped the great upheavals of our young century into a novel of rare intimacy and power.